An access point (AP) in a deployment may be attacked by a rogue AP. The rogue AP may transmit fake beacons that include a fake/incorrect basic service set (BSS) color that does not match the BSS color assigned to/used by the AP under attack. Due to this BSS color mismatch, stations associated to the AP under attack may switch to the fake/incorrect BSS color, and communications between the AP under attack and the stations may be disrupted, and can eventually lead to service denial. Systems and methods are provided for leveraging the BSS color feature to identify when a rogue AP is attacking another AP. Upon detecting an attack, the BSS color feature may be disabled to mitigate the level of service disruption to the AP under attack and the stations associated to that AP.
Legal claims defining the scope of protection, as filed with the USPTO.
2. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 1, wherein the transmission comprises an uplink packet transmission by the STA to the first AP.
3. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 2, wherein the instructions further cause the hardware processor to cache the uplink packet transmission prior to the disabling of the BSS color feature.
4. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 3, wherein the instructions further cause the hardware processor to acknowledge (ACK) the uplink packet transmission prior to the disabling of the BSS color feature.
5. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 1, wherein the instructions further cause the hardware processor to process subsequently received transmission based only on MAC address filtering.
7. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 6, wherein the instructions further cause the hardware processor to request a block acknowledgement (ACK) from the STA pursuant to non-receipt of any ACKs for the downlink packet transmissions.
8. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 7, wherein the downlink packet transmissions are the result of the STA-perceived BSS color not matching the BSS color associated with the AP.
9. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 6, wherein the STA-perceived BSS color results from a fake beacon transmitted by a rogue AP to the STA.
10. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 7, wherein the instructions further cause the hardware processor to cache the downlink packet transmissions.
11. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 9, wherein the instructions further cause the hardware processor to transmit the downlink packet transmissions to the STA after the disabling of the BSS color feature.
12. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 6, wherein the AP receives the STA-perceived BSS color in a Quality Of Service (QOS) NULL frame.
14. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 13, wherein the known BSS color-to-MAC address mapping is maintained in a centralized repository of the network operatively connected to the AP that received the beacon and the intended AP whose MAC address matches that of the MAC address received in the beacon.
15. The non-transitory machine-readable storage medium of claim 13, wherein the known BSS color-to-MAC address mapping is shared between APs operative in the network via an AP controller.
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April 30, 2021
May 30, 2023
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